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Monday, January 10, 2011

A Home School/Home Business Success Story

I am really excited to bring this interview to you today. As a homeschooling mother of four, it is always encouraging to me to hear the success stories of other homeschool families. It is even more encouraging to see the children, who have been homeschooled, grow up and move out into the world and be successful. Here is one of those encouraging stories. I hope you enjoy...

Tell Us About Your CraftingQ - How long have you been crafting? A - TemporaryTrappings is a combined family endeavor which includes myself - Ashley, my mom, Caroline, my two younger sisters, Sarah and Julie and even our grandma, who helps us work our booth at craft shows. My great-grandma often crafted and passed along a lot of her supplies to her grandchildren (my mom), including some really cool sequins and beads that we still have. My mom began crafting during her teen years, learning to sew, cross stitch, and then jewelry making. When my sisters and I were young she would make our dresses and pajamas. As we grew up, she passed on her love of crafting to my sisters and I. Decorative painting remains one of her greatest passions and combining that with jewelry making is where her current interest is. Christmas ornaments will always be a big part of her crafting as well. 2011 marks about 28 years of our combined crafting experience as a family, and we have big plans for our crafting business in 2011! We each have our areas of interest: Ashley, jewelry and clay; Sarah scrapbooking and paper crafting; Julie, jewelry and metal working.

Q - Do you have childhood memories of a crafting success or failure? A - The one event that I can remember as a child which really started my crafting journey was learning how to macramé. My mom taught herself because I wanted to learn how, and after she mastered it, she taught me. I remember spending one whole day (which seemed forever when you’re ten years old!) trying to get the hang of all those knots. I turned my new skill into a salvation bracelet that included a little poem about the symbolism of the colors of each of the crosses that were knotted within the bracelet. Another memory which we all share is all of the craft shows that we have done over the years. Whether or not we participated in them, they were always a family event and are great places to get those creative juices flowing.

Q - Do you have your own workspace? A - Any flat surface fills our needs. haha

Q - Could you tell us about it? A - Actually, we do have a room on the second floor of our house that is dedicated to housing all of our crafting supplies and tools. More often than not, what ends up happening is we go “shopping” in our craft room, take our goodies downstairs and end up making our pieces in various places around the house as we like being together as a family and there just isn’t enough workspace in the craft room. That is another one of our goals this year - to redesign our crafting room to better accommodate multiple crafters/projects. It just isn’t fun to have to clean up your project, completed or not, and then get it all back out again to work on it. Too much time is wasted with the set up and tear down and it can become discouraging.

Q - What inspires you to create new pieces? A - Well each one of us has our own different interests, which inspire us to create our own unique pieces. For instance, my younger sister Julie is really into the vintage, steampunk style. She loves all things that have to do with the Renaissance and learning how things work, and is teaching herself how to cut out charms from metal. Right now she’s working on designing jewelry for a local band called Summit Grove, and in one of her pieces she throws her steampunk style in the mix by sewing cogs and gears onto this beautiful flower piece. It’s all about knowing what you like, and learning how to have your personal style come through in your work.

Your Homeschool Life

Q - Are you currently home schooling? A - If so how many and what ages/grades? While I am currently in college, working on my BA, I was homeschooled during high school. My two younger sisters, Sarah and Julie are being homeschooled right now.

Q - What challenges do you face when combining homeschooling and home business? A - Being homeschooled was a wonderful experience. It allowed me the time to work at the pace I needed to learn at, while giving me extra time to spend with family, friends and on finding my hobbies. The one thing that I, and I know the rest of my family deals with, is the struggle with staying on schedule. When you spend a lot of time at home, it is easy to let yourself fall into the project/subject at hand, which can consume your day if you don’t have a set “length of time” for it. This seems to be a blessing and a hindrance of schooling at home. Your day is your own and allows you to study what you want, at your own pace. Consistently using a planner has helped us tremendously! Once you learn to conquer the schedule and make time for the things that need to get done, everything else falls into place.

More About YourselfQ - What is your education background? A - After graduating from a long distance, high school education program in the spring of 2008, I began working on my Bachelor’s. Right now I am in my junior year and am a full-time student.

Q - Did you do other work before you began selling your handmade arts or crafts? If yes, what was it? A - Along with spending any extra time we have crafting, Sarah and I both work part time jobs in a book store, (just can’t stay away from books … lol) and our family helps out friends with babysitting during the week as needed. Prior to coming home full time to raise our family my mom worked in advertising and desktop publishing. Both of these skills have helped in our home crafting business.

Q - Why did you choose to start your home business? A - After tagging along to a few craft shows that my mom participated in while I was in high school, I realized that we needed a way to get our crafts online. I eventually found Etsy.com and it wasn’t long before our shop was up and running.

Q - Do you have a favorite Quote or Verse (or both if you wish to share)

“As we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18

"It is well that we have hobbies and crafts, not only do they give a sense of purpose but they have a purpose of themselves, too." ~ Phyllis George

Q - Are you currently reading a book? If so, what is it and would you recommend it to others? Why or why not? A - I (Caroline) just finished reading Choosing to See by Mary Beth Chapman and I highly recommend it! In fact, I liked it so much I purchased our own copy and my daughters are all taking turns reading it. It is a book that teaches us that we can have our *plans* for our life, but in the end, God’s path for us may not be the one that we chose, but it is the one that takes us to the places we need to visit, willingly or not, and the grace to see us through difficult situations, sustaining us when it becomes too hard, and seeing us through to the other side of it, healing us along the way. I truly admire Mary Beth and her family for the gift of this book, as painful as it was to write, but the blessing of the book for them and for anyone that reads it is a gift that keeps giving as the need to reread it will undoubtedly come up. And I did enjoy Mary Beth’s honesty about her personal faults…many of which I share with her, thinking I was the only one quirky like that.

Q - Where else could we find you on the web? A - We are currently working on updating the layout of our following websites:www.temporarytrappings.blogspot.com http://temporarytrappings.tumblr.com/

The picture of the necklace(above) is a piece my sister Julie designed for a local band from Las Vegas called Summit Grove. It can be bought by visiting Summit Groves facebook page.

Who are we?

We are a group of Etsy artisans united by the bond of home education. SHE is a family-oriented team. Shops must meet team requirements in addition to Etsy rules, especially in regard to mature content and prohibited items. SHE is a "G"-rated team.

If you are schooling at home, have recently schooled at home, or working towards schooling at home( starting in 6 months or less) and your items fit with our target audience and community as a whole, you are welcome to apply for the team.